The New Yorker:

A change in leadership at the network has been seen as part of an effort to appease Donald Trump. But there may be other motivations.

By Jon Allsop

In 2018, Bari Weiss, then an opinion columnist at the Times, wrote about the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, a loose “alliance of heretics” who were “making an end run around the mainstream conversation.” Adherents were photographed for the article in literally dark settings: glowering out from under an umbrella, perched amid mossy branches, standing half-obscured by bushes. Though they came from different ideological backgrounds, Weiss wrote, these figures—including Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture-capital fund, who had “half-jokingly” coined the movement’s name; Joe Rogan, an “MMA color commentator and comedian” with a hugely popular podcast; and Jordan Peterson, the already best-selling philosopher—felt they had been ostracized by legacy media outlets in the Trump era for voicing reasonable opinions. These positions ran the gamut: arguing that free speech was under attack, believing in biological gender differences, thinking that forcing Muslim women to “live their lives inside bags is wrong.” Many in the group were building channels of their own. Weiss was sympathetic, but did not quite commit to fellowship. “Having been attacked by the left,” she wrote, “I know I run the risk of focusing inordinately on its excesses—and providing succor to some people whom I deeply oppose.”

Weiss wrote this article at something like the midpoint of her Times journey. When Donald Trump won the Presidency in 2016, she was at the Wall Street Journal; the morning after the election, she sobbed at her desk, and realized that she felt too liberal for the paper and needed to leave. In 2017, she joined the Times, where this was definitely not a problem—but, after three years of being consistently derided (not least over the I.D.W. piece), she quit, and, on the way out, publicly accused her colleagues of cowering before the orthodoxies of Twitter and “bullying” her for committing “Wrongthink.” She has said that she voted for Joe Biden in 2020. But, by the beginning of this year, she was sounding more conciliatory about Trump, dismissing her prior anguish as “Trump derangement syndrome.” “There were two things, I think, that I didn’t know in that moment when I was crying at my desk,” she explained: “the kind of illiberalism that was born out of the reaction” to Trump, and the fact that he would enact “a lot of policies that I agreed with.”

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